The New York Mets are a cautionary tale walking around in a baseball uniform.
Through the first six weeks of the 2026 season, the Mets sit at 13-22 — the worst record in baseball — despite carrying MLB’s highest payroll at $352 million. Juan Soto alone costs $61.9 million a year. Dead last in wOBA. April brought a 12-game losing streak, the longest the franchise has had since 2002. Steve Cohen, a man worth more than most small nations, took to social media to publicly apologize to fans.
Cohen addressed fans directly on X:
Mets fans everywhere. I owe you an apology . You did your part by showing up and supporting the team. We didn’t do our part. We will do a post-mortem and figure out the obvious and less obvious reasons why the team didn’t perform up to your and my expectations
We are all feeling…— Steven Cohen (@StevenACohen2) September 29, 2025
That’s what spending $352 million on a 13-22 baseball team sounds like.
Meanwhile, the Cardinals are 21-15, sitting second in the NL Central, on a payroll somewhere in the $102-111 million range. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a third of what the Mets are spending. And it’s working.
The front office took a lot of heat for the Arenado trade, for moving Sonny Gray, Willson Contreras, Brendan Donovan — for gutting the roster in the name of a rebuild that Cardinals fans weren’t sure they had the stomach for. For a while, it looked a lot like losing, and losing is something this fanbase does not enjoy. Legitimate questions existed about whether the organization actually had a plan or was just clearing salary and hoping for the best.
Jordan Walker is the answer to those questions.
In 34 games, Walker is hitting .284/.356/.548 with 9 home runs, 22 RBI, and a .904 OPS. His Statcast numbers — 95.2 mph average exit velocity, 57.4% hard-hit rate, .420 wOBA — aren’t the stats of a guy having a hot April. A player who figured something out looks like this. At 23, he looks like he belongs in an MVP conversation, which is a sentence that would have seemed delusional before this season.
The Mets, for comparison, paid $61.9 million for one player and still have the worst offense in baseball by wOBA. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, and it isn’t subtle.
Reports indicate the Mets have already set a June 1 internal deadline to turn things around before potentially triggering a fire sale — with Freddy Peralta being shopped and as many as 11 players available, per multiple outlets. Here’s the Newsweek breakdown. And the payroll context, via Yahoo Sports. June 1. They’re not even in June yet and the season is essentially over.
There’s something almost darkly satisfying about this if you’re a Cardinals fan who got lectured at family gatherings about how the team wasn’t “competing” while New York was out there signing everyone in sight. This is what happens when you buy wins instead of building them. You get a $352 million roster with the worst record in baseball and an owner apologizing on the internet.
The Cardinals are fourth in farm system rankings entering 2026, per MLB Pipeline. Walker is one piece of it. The youth pipeline is real.
This isn’t schadenfreude — or, okay, it’s a little bit schadenfreude. But it’s also just what sustainable roster construction looks like when it works versus when it doesn’t. One team bet on stars, skipped the infrastructure, and is already planning its yard sale. St. Louis traded its veterans, trusted its minor leagues, and is sitting two games above .500 with a 23-year-old slugger who’s turning into something special.
The Mets spent $352 million to remind the rest of baseball that money doesn’t skip the line.
